The rush of excitement around artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is undeniable. These technologies are quickly moving into the enterprise, accelerating workflows and enabling busy teams to offload many of their most time-intensive tasks. But while everyone is eager to find use cases for AI, some companies may not be exercising enough care about what kinds of data they feed into their AI solutions and which other entities might gain access to that information along the way. 

Your data governance and privacy obligations don’t end where AI begins, so take the time now to consider the guardrails you need to have in place to ensure you maintain control over your data assets. 

Practice good data hygiene 

Access to clean and accurate data is critical for any AI/ML initiative. Incomplete, obsolete, or plain old wrong information is the last thing you want to feed into an AI platform. The outputs you receive will be suspect, and those questionable results could find their way into other parts of your business, too. Emphasize good data hygiene across your AWS environments to ensure your information is up to date and correct. These careful practices will enable you to pull more value from your AI solutions and you’ll also avoid the risk of injecting bad information by mistake. 

Prioritize data privacy 

Consider a scenario where a well-intentioned employee takes your firm’s Salesforce forecast and throws it into ChatGPT. Did you just move proprietary information out of your protected AWS environment and into the wild? And if so, do you have a clear understanding of how your data is processed and what else it might be used for? Because once sensitive data is out there, you aren’t getting it back. Whether you’re working with your own corporate information or data related to customers, patients, students, employees, or collaborators, those people likely expect you to keep their data private and prevent it from being used to train AI/ML models. Strong data privacy and governance practices will ensure you maximize AI’s capabilities without disclosing protected information. 

Maintain a human touch 

AI seems to be everywhere but it’s important to remember that we’re still in the early days of its use in the commercial space. As more users get first-hand access to the various AI models, reports are popping up about AI “hallucinating,” where results sound very confidently right but are, in fact, entirely wrong. Some outputs are simply inaccurate, others are a complete fabrication. These instances should act as a warning flag to businesses that AI isn’t ready to replace humans. Rarely can the technology produce the desired results on its own. Instead, AI/ML solutions still need governance by people, who can understand context, fact check results, apply their experience, and turn the AI’s outputs into something that’s relevant and usable. 

Understand regional considerations 

Enterprises working outside the U.S., and particularly those operating in the European Union (EU), should be aware of issues that could affect their use of—or access to—AI/ML solutions. Overseas regulators have discussed potentially limiting AI platforms’ operations in their regions until data privacy, consumer and creator protections, and other issues are resolved. Recent laws such as the EU’s AI Act may affect how businesses apply AI to their workflows. Domestically, a growing patchwork of state-level data privacy laws must also be fully understood before you can be confident your AI initiative is compliant with the regulations that apply in your markets. 

Watch for the intersection of shadow IT and AI use 

Enterprises already know the struggle of managing shadow IT, which refers to software installations undertaken by employees without the technology group’s authorization. Most shadow IT stems from good intentions—someone needed to complete a task and they found an application or platform to do it. But these rogue installations, however well-meaning, can be a significant vulnerability in your data privacy and security efforts if workers feed the wrong kind of information into an AI/ML solution. You could even run the risk of noncompliance if their actions violate regulatory mandates. Careful management and monitoring of your AWS environment can help minimize opportunities for shadow IT to spring up and improve control over your data. 

To ensure your AI strategy doesn’t compromise your security and compliance posture or put data privacy at risk, consider developing governance guardrails to guide your organization forward. Cloudnexa’s data governance and security experts can help you create a plan that suits your enterprise’s unique goals and maintains strong protections for important data assets across your AWS accounts. 

If you’re a technology provider working in any corner of the healthcare sector, now is a good time to take a fresh look at your security posture. The cybersecurity landscape is more nuanced than ever, featuring highly determined threat actors as well as expanded regulatory scrutiny. 

Traditional defense strategies are also more complex, as companies struggle to secure increasingly outmoded legacy and on-prem infrastructures or work to select the right security tools and services to support highly scalable AWS environments and other cloud technologies. No matter your chosen mix of architectures, the safeguards that previously kept your systems and data safe may no longer offer the level of protection you need, and you don’t want to wait for a breach to occur before updating your practices. 

Let’s look at why now is the right time for healthtech firms to rethink security. 

Ransomware and other attacks are growing 

Hackers are stepping up their efforts to infiltrate companies across the spectrum, including healthcare provider organizations and the technology companies that support them. The MOVEit exploit is just one example that remains an active incident months after it was first discovered. So far, more than 2,000 organizations and over 55 million people—healthcare firms and patients among them—have fallen victim. Unfortunately, large-scale cyber events are no longer rare. Entire healthcare systems, comprising multiple large hospitals and dozens of smaller clinical sites, have suffered attacks that kept systems offline for weeks at a time. 

What’s worrisome for healthtechs is that healthcare organizations themselves aren’t always the first ones breached. Compromised technology partners can be a goldmine of poorly secured data repositories and unprotected connections that lead attackers to even more lucrative targets. As healthcare providers become savvier about their own cybersecurity, many are recognizing the growing risks posed by downstream technology vendors. If third-party providers have outdated or insufficient security practices, it could make everyone along the chain more vulnerable to a breach. 

Regulatory scrutiny is changing in healthcare

Updated regulatory guidance and new rules are further influencing the security discussion in healthcare. Tracking pixels, including those from Meta, Google, and others, are one significant area of concern. These trackers have likely been embedded on providers’ websites and scheduling portals for years without either the organizations or their patients being aware of them. Many consumer-facing healthcare apps also include tracking technology, such as those used to monitor insulin levels or ovulation cycles. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has made it clear they are more closely scrutinizing the use of these tracking tools by healthcare organizations, telehealth providers, and healthtech partners, warning they may represent a serious and reportable HIPAA breach. Despite the years-long presence of some trackers, regulators began taking action earlier this year via letters sent to more than 100 entities about potential data privacy and security violations related to their use of tracking tools. 

Medical device tech firms and manufacturers are also managing recent changes in regulatory requirements. Ongoing worries about a lack of security standards, the continued reliance on legacy technology, and the growing attack profile of medical devices have led to new cybersecurity rules set out by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) related to vulnerability disclosures and security controls, among other elements. Elements of the updated guidance replace regulations set out almost a decade ago. 

More technology dependencies in healthcare mean more risks to manage 

To expand their telehealth offerings and other services while maintaining a focus on their core mission of serving patients, many healthcare organizations rely on a network of technology partners. But as cyber risks, compliance rules, and patient expectations evolve, some of those tech providers may have fallen behind on the latest security concerns and challenges. 

Your customers—whether they’re patients, care providers, or other technology partners—need you to help maintain a strong security perimeter around the networks and data that power the healthcare industry. If you’re working in or near healthcare, thorough reviews of your risk profile, your practices, the security measures deployed within your AWS environments as well as any on-prem infrastructure, and your network of technology partners are in order. 

• Are your own cloud and physical environments secure? 
• Does your team consistently follow security best practices? 
• Do you have the right monitoring tools in place to proactively identify potential risks? 
• Where do you rely on other providers to deliver services? 
• When was the last time you discussed your tech partners’ security strategies? 
• Where might your solution or service be vulnerable if a downstream technology provider experiences a breach? 
• How do your partners ensure patient data is protected against deliberate intrusion as well as accidental disclosure? 

Between the escalating threat picture and dynamic regulatory environment, any practice or measure you haven’t looked at recently could prove to be less effective than you expect. Legacy infrastructures can easily fall behind on security patches and updates. Companies with sensitive cloud environments may not yet use some of the newer tools and services offered by AWS to further enhance security. Considering all the recent changes, this is a prime opportunity for healthtech enterprises to review their security and compliance postures and address any gaps that may have appeared. 

Cloudnexa’s team of healthcare cybersecurity experts today to help identify and mitigate your organization’s security risks, assess your compliance programs, and evaluate the network of downstream suppliers and providers you rely on to deliver your services. 

Trust and transparency

We’re thrilled to announce that Cloudnexa recently achieved the critically important SOC 2 Type II attestation for the second year. Our team also achieved our first ISO/IEC 27001 certification. This is big news for our customers because we know you entrust us with your sensitive data, and our recent security compliance accomplishments mean you can be confident that we’re committed to safeguarding your information.

But we don’t just say that customers’ data is safe with us. An independent auditor reviewed our cybersecurity controls and confirmed that our data security program meets the rigorous SOC 2 Type II compliance standard set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) for information security. We also underwent an examination by an accreditation body to ensure that our information security management systems are certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, an internationally recognized and difficult-to-achieve standard that’s jointly published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

Cloudnexa puts the focus on cybersecurity

Information security and data privacy remain top priorities for enterprises as ransomware ravages systems and attackers look for new vulnerabilities to exploit. In research conducted by Ponemon Institute and analyzed by IBM, the average cost of a data breach across all sectors in 2023 stood at $4.45 million. That represents a 15% increase since the 2020 report. Highly regulated industries such as healthcare incur even higher costs at almost $11 million per breach, which is up more than 53% from the findings three years ago. But those ballooning costs aren’t the whole picture. Figures from the Identity Theft Resource Center show in excess of 1,800 data compromises reported in 2022, impacting more than 422 million victims.

Amid this dynamic (and costly) threat landscape, enterprises are increasingly reliant on third-party partners to execute a variety of vital business operations. Those relationships often involve data sharing, such as providing a payroll processor with employees’ names and bank routing numbers for paycheck direct deposits. Managed service providers (MSPs) like Cloudnexa also house and handle customers’ data while delivering services and offerings, making our cybersecurity posture of critical importance to the businesses we serve.

The SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audit and review processes involve evaluations carried out by independent, accredited bodies. Each compliance framework has its own requirements, but reviewers generally assess and test an enterprise’s security systems, practices, controls, and policies to ensure they meet the current standard. Maintaining a sufficiently high level of data privacy and information security over time is no easy task, but Cloudnexa’s stringent measures ensure we provide strong and consistent protection around customer data. Our commitment to maintaining secure environments for ourselves and our customers is top of mind. Compliance with these highly regarded standards ensures that we maintain and follow well-documented policies and procedures, and that our cybersecurity program and risk management strategies align with best practices.

Why do independent information security and data privacy certifications matter to your business?

Many companies moving to the cloud require their top-tier partners to have one or more security certifications in place before doing business. Customers benefit by prioritizing relationships with firms already well-versed in data privacy protections.

• It can be difficult and time consuming to individually vet each of your vendor’s various security programs, measures, and protocols. A SOC 2 Type II attestation or an ISO 27001 certification tells you the provider has already committed to safeguarding customers’ data by complying with industry standards for information security and data privacy.
• If your enterprise is required to comply with SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001, your compliance could be in jeopardy if you hand data to a downstream provider that doesn’t meet the requirements. To avoid potential enforcement actions, working with certified third-party partners will help keep you in compliance.
• From a practical standpoint, your company wants to avoid a breach. The best strategy is to protect your organization’s data—whether it’s internal information or data provided by or linked to your customers—at every turn. An MSP with certification from a recognized accreditation body undergoes regular audits and reviews, with confirmation that sufficient controls and policies are in place to protect customer information against attacks. You can share information confidently, knowing everything is as safe with your MSP as it is with you.

The value of risk mitigation in SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance

Data breaches involving third parties continue to make headlines. In today’s multi-layered, highly interconnected environment, it’s no surprise that enterprises rely heavily on vendors and other partners to carry out important work. But if those third parties experience a security event, your organization’s data—or data related to your customers, patients, or collaborators—could be exposed, even if you’ve taken the proper steps internally to protect it. Your safeguards don’t extend outside the perimeter of your business, so you need to know that your third-party partners have equally strong data security measures in place.

Our information security management certifications translate into strong data privacy for our customers, reducing their risk of unauthorized data exposure and closing the loop on data protection. We frequently house sensitive information related to cloud service consumption, configurations, and other client account details. Our customers may share their own confidential data, such as financial information, contracts that often include names and signatures, and personally identifiable information for executives and employees using the services. Cloudnexa’s vigorous security compliance posture ensures the confidentiality of and security around the data we hold about our customers. And because we have multiple certifications, our clients can be confident that we’re compliant with the recognized standards in every region where they do business.

For fintechs, enterprises working in healthcare, and those operating in other industries where data privacy and information security are paramount, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance for third-party providers are often non-negotiable requirements for doing business. Contact us today if you’re looking for an AWS partner with a strong background in SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, or other security compliance frameworks.